Status of Arizona- and Alabama-inspired Legislation (and Litigation)

SB 1070 Four Years Later: Lessons LearnedSB 1070’s enactment in Arizona prompted legislators in five other states—Utah, Georgia, Indiana, Alabama, and South Carolina—to enact similar legislation in 2011. However, most of these other states have settled the legal challenges that immigrants’ rights groups brought against the laws they enacted.

On April 25, 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in United States v. Arizona, the first legal challenge to a state racial profiling law to reach the highest court in the land. A year after Arizona’s SB 1070 was enacted, Alabama passed its own law, HB 56, which is widely considered to be the most far-reaching anti-immigrant law in the country.

Utah’s “Illegal Immigration Enforcement Act” (H.B. 497) is an enforcement-only bill that copies several provisions from Arizona’s controversial SB 1070 and includes others that lead to the same result — of driving immigrants from the state. The “Utah Immigration Accountability and Enforcement Act” (H.B. 116) attempts to establish a state immigrant worker permit while also imposing numerous requirements on applicants for the proposed status and heightening employment eligibility verification requirements. This is an overview of some of these bills’ most dangerous provisions.

"Despite much media hype, the supposed wave of anti-immigrant politics has amounted to a few punitive laws in a handful of states, even as most states have quietly been moving forward with positive, integrative approaches to new immigrants in their communities." (Progressive States Network, 9/08, PDF)